Recollections of a Varied Life

by George Cary Eggleston

LXX

Every literary worker has his own methods, and I have never known any one of them to adopt the methods of another with success. Temperament has a good deal to do with it; habit, perhaps, a good deal more, and circumstance more than all.

I have always been an extemporaneous writer, if I may apply the adjective to writers as we do to speakers. I have never been able to sit down and "compose" anything before writing it. I have endeavored always to master the subjects of my writing by study and careful thought, but I have never known when I wrote a first sentence or a first chapter what the second was to be. I think from the point of my pen, so far at least as my thinking formulates itself in written words.

I suppose this to be a consequence of my thirty-odd years of newspaper experience. In the giddy, midnight whirl of making a great newspaper there is no time for "first drafts," "outline sketches," "final revisions," and all that sort of thing. When the telegraph brings news at midnight that requires a leader—perhaps in double leads—the editorial writer has an hour or less, with frequent interruptions, in which to write his article, get it into type, revise the proofs, and make up the page that contains it. He has no choice but to write extemporaneously. He must hurriedly set down on paper what his newspaper has to say on the subject, and send his sheets at once to the printers, sometimes keeping messenger boys at his elbow to take the pages from his hand one after another as fast as they are written. His only opportunity for revision is on the proof slips, and even in that he is limited by the necessity of avoiding every alteration that may involve the overrunning of a line.

In this and other ways born of necessity, the newspaper writer learns the art of extemporaneous writing, which is only another way of saying that he learns how to write at his best in the first instance, without lazily depending upon revision for smoothness, clearness, terseness, and force. He does not set down ill-informed or ill-considered judgments. Every hour of every day of his life is given to the close study of the subjects upon which he is at last called upon to write under stress of tremendous hurry. He knows all about his theme. He has all the facts at his fingers' ends. He is familiar with every argument that has been or can be made on the questions involved. He knows all his statistics, and his judgments have been carefully thought out in advance. His art consists in the ability to select on the instant what phases of the subject he will treat, and to write down his thought clearly, impressively, convincingly, and in the best rhetorical form he can give it.

Extemporaneous Writing

I think that one who has acquired that habit of extemporaneous writing about things already mastered in thought can never learn to write in any other way. Both experience and observation have convinced me that men of that intellectual habit do more harm than good to their work when they try to improve it by revision. Revision in every such case is apt to mean elaboration, and elaboration is nearly always a weakening dilution of thought.

I am disposed to think that whatever saves trouble to the writer is purchased at the expense of the reader. The classic dictum that "easy writing makes hard reading" is as true to-day as it was when Horace made laborious use of the flat end of his stylus. For myself, at any rate, I have never been able to "dictate," either "to the machine," or to a stenographer, with satisfactory results, nor have I ever known anybody else to do so without some sacrifice to laziness of that which it is worth a writer's while to toil for. The stenographer and the typewriter have their place as servants of commerce, but in literature they tend to diffusion, prolixity, inexactitude, and, above all, to carelessness in that choice of words that makes the difference between grace and clumsiness, lucidity and cloud, force and feebleness.

In the writing of novels, I have always been seriously embarrassed by the strange perversity of fictitious people. That is a matter that has puzzled and deeply interested me ever since I became a practising novelist.

The most ungrateful people in the world are the brain-children of the novelist, the male and female folk whose existence is due to the good will of the writer. Born of the travail of the novelist's brain, and endowed by him with whatever measure of wit, wisdom, or wealth they possess; personally conducted by him in their struggles toward the final happiness he has foreordained for them at the end of the story; cared for; coddled; listened to and reported even when they talk nonsense, and not infrequently when they only think it; laboriously brought to the attention of other people; pushed, if possible, into a fame they could never have achieved for themselves; they nevertheless obstinately persist in thwarting their creator's purpose and doing as they wickedly please to his sore annoyance and vexation of spirit.

In truth, the author of a story has very little control over its course after he has once laid its foundations. The novel is not made—it grows, and the novelist does little more than plant the seed and keep the growth unchoked by weeds. He is as powerless to make it other than what it tends to be as the gardener is to grow tomatoes on corn-stalks or cucumbers on pea-vines. He may create for the story what manner of people he pleases, just as the gardener may choose the seed he will plant; but once created these fictitious people will behave according to their individual natures without heed to the wishes of the author of their being.

In other words, the novelist is under bond to his conscience to represent his personages as talking and acting precisely as such personages would talk and act under the circumstances in which he has placed them. It often happens that their sentiments, their utterances, and their conduct do not fit into the author's preconceived arrangement of happenings, so that he must alter his entire story or important parts of it to make it true.

I have borrowed the last few paragraphs from a playful paper I wrote for an obscure magazine thirty-odd years ago, because they suggest a trouble that must come to every conscientious novelist many times during the writing of every story. There come times when the novelist doesn't know what happened, and must toilsomely explore his consciousness by way of finding out.

Working Hours and Working Ways

My working hours are determined by circumstances—morning, afternoon, evening, or late at night. When there is a "must" involved, I work when I must; when I am free I work when I choose or when I feel that I can.

I never carry my work to bed with me, and I never let it rob me of a moment's sleep. To avoid that I usually play a game or two of solitaire —perhaps the least intellectual of all possible occupations—between work and bedtime; and I usually take a walk in the open air just before going to bed, whatever the weather may be. But whatever else happens, I long ago acquired the art of absolutely dismissing the subject of my work from my mind, whenever I please, and the more difficult art of refusing to let any other subject of interest take its place. I do that when I go to bed, and when I do that nothing less than positive physical pain can keep me from going to sleep.

I have always been fond of fishing and boating. In summer, at my Lake George cottage, I have a little fleet of small boats moored within twenty paces of my porch-placed writing table. If my mind flags at my work I step into my fishing boat and give an hour or two to a sport that occupies the attention without fatiguing it. If I am seriously perplexed by any work-problem, I take a rowboat, with a pair of eight-foot oars, and go for a ten-mile spin. On my return I find that my problem has completely wrought itself out in my mind without conscious effort on my part.

I am fond of flower gardening and, without the least technical skill in it, I usually secure astonishingly good results. The plants seem to respond generously to my uninstructed but kindly attention.

In my infancy my mother taught me to begin every day with a plunge into water as cold as I could get, and I have kept up the habit with the greatest benefit. I find it a perfect tonic as well as a luxurious delight.

I have always enforced upon myself two rules with respect to literary style: First, to utter my thought simply and with entire sincerity, and, second, never consciously to write or leave a sentence in such form that even a blundering reader might mistake its meaning.

Here let me bring to an end these random recollections of a life which has involved hard work, distressing responsibility, and much of disappointment, but which has been filled from the beginning with that joy of success which is the chief reward of endeavor to every man who loves his work and puts conscience into it.